We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Sam Schwartz. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Sam below.

Sam, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What do you think it takes to be successful?

What I think it takes to be successful is a mixture of many things, especially as a small business. First and foremost – unrelenting hard work, and the desire to truly and 100% WANT TO succeed in what you are going after. Sometimes I feel as if people open a business nowadays because it is the “trendy” thing to do, to be an “entrepreneur”, when in reality they don’t truly want that, and I have seen it happen pretty often in my life.

There will be times throughout your career or business where you may feel a type of uncertainty or doubt as to what you are doing, maybe asking yourself, “is this for me?”, “what am I doing this for?, “can I make this work?, “do I have imposter syndrome?”. I consider these things normal as running and owning your own business is one of the hardest things to do, and when these things cross your mind it is important to always focus on the end goal and to push through. Learn from any mistakes and use that as fuel to be better.

Being kind. While there are people out there that will argue that being a relentless or ruthless entrepreneur is the only way to be successful, I would argue otherwise. I have found that being kind has not only gotten me further in life, it has forged connections with people that have turned into life long friendships, and continued business – plus the world needs a little more kindness in it.

Making connections is arguably one of the most important things you could ever do. At any job, talk to all the people in the room, be interested, make a conversation. If someone invites you out for dinner, or drinks, don’t be afraid and go for it, I’ve found that most connections I make come from outside of actually working.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Growing up at a young age I got introduced to skateboarding through one of my best friends. For years we would travel around to different places to go skate, and make silly home videos. Well, recording those home videos I didn’t know at the exact time would turn into a full blown passion of mine. I began filming more, and more, and more.

Being involved in skateboarding also helped mold my passion for action sports, adrenaline, cars, and things of that nature. I started to expand my filmmaking to the automotive space where I really solidified a name for myself and found another true passion of mine in cars. This whole fast paced world of skateboarding, action sports, and cars I was able to form tons of different connections over the years which helped to grow and evolve not only myself but my business.

Today my focus is still creating content, commercials, movies, and more, all based around this. I have grown my social networks to over a few hundred thousand subscribers, and have won awards for various films that I am insanely proud of, and I can’t wait to continue this journey.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Being in the video production space is tough, especially starting out. My main focus is in the automotive space which is where my passion truly lies and luckily I was able to build a lot of connections through that space. However, there were many times where business was slow, and I couldn’t expand in that field. So taking my knowledge of filmmaking and creating content, I expanded into other fields to help grow the business. Corporate videos, interviews, product videos, you name it, I’ve done it. Never be afraid to stray from the course to get to your end goal.

How did you build your audience on social media?

My presence on social media comes from creating automotive content. I built this from the ground up working an insane amount of hours. I would go to car shows, create a video from it, get people to share it, rinse and repeat maybe a million different times, and create something different each time. In addition to that filming peoples vehicles that wanted to show them off in a cinematic way.

For those that are just starting to build their social media presence, never be discouraged if things take a long time to grow, because at one point something may click overnight and you’ll see a huge momentum swing. Make sure your content is different, but genuine, people pick up when a video is put together lazily. Most importantly, just keep posting.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.schwaafilms.com
• Instagram: @schwaafilms
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/schwaafilms

Image Credits

@r.ego
@papichulo.arw